Home > Work > The Pathfinder (Leatherstocking Tales, #3)
1 " A man without conscience is but a poor creature... "
― James Fenimore Cooper , The Pathfinder (Leatherstocking Tales, #3)
2 " Patience is the greatest of virtues in a woodsman. "
3 " I have attended church-service in the garrisons, and tried hard...to join in the prayers...but never could raise within me the solemn feelings and true affection that I feel when alone with God in the forest. There I seem to stand face to face with my Master; all around me is fresh and beautiful, as it came from His hand; and there is no nicety or doctrine to chill the feelings. No no; the woods are the true temple after all, for there the thoughts are free to mount higher even than the clouds. "
4 " We are all human, and all do wrong. "
5 " Walking about streets, going to church of Sundays, and hearing sermons, never yet made a man of a human being. Send the boy out upon the broad ocean, if you wish to open his eyes, and let him look upon foreign nations, or what I call the face of nature, if you wish him to understand his own character. "
6 " I want no thunder or lightning to remind me of my God, nor am I as apt to bethink on most of all His goodness in trouble and tribulations as on a calm, solemn, quiet day in a forest, when His voice is heard in the creaking of a dead branch or in the song of a bird, as much in my ears at least as it is ever heard in uproar and gales. "
7 " I care not for your envy, or your hypocrisy, or even for your human nature. "
8 " ...for though the quiet of deep solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water ripped, and at places even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body. "
9 " ...every period of life has its necessities, and at forty-seven it's just as well to trust a little to the head. "
10 " Ah's me! if we could be what what we wish to be, instead of being only what we are, there would be a great difference in our characters and knowledge and appearance. One may be rude and coarse and ignorant, and yet happy, if he does not know it; but it is hard to see our own failings in the strongest light, just as we wish to hear the least about them. "
11 " ...for flowers that will bloom in a garden will die on a heath... "
12 " Life is sweet, even to the aged; and, for that matter, I've known some that seemed to set much store by it when it got to be of the least value. "
13 " But even the falsest of men pay so much homage to truth as to seem its votaries. "
14 " The turf shall be my fragrant shrine; My temple, Lord! that arch of thine; My censer's breath the mountain airs, And silent thoughts my only prayers. MOORE "
15 " happy hunting-grounds "
16 " natur'? "
17 " Joan of Arc, "
18 " Frontenackers "
19 " else would my scalp long since have been drying in a Mingo wigwam. "
20 " natur' is natur', "
